We woke up to a frost covered MSR Access tent but the rising sun soon melted away the icy crust. It had been a chilly night - below zero most likely.

We packed up relatively quickly and started riding. Surprisingly to us, we had not camped at the top of the pass. Instead, we climbed for another half mile or so when we came to the true pass. A pile of large pile of rocks with offerings of Mongolian cash, small trinkets and easily 50 old ram's horns. We were excited for the downhill run. From the top, we could also see an immense area of sand dunes - our potential camp for the evening.

Part way down the descent, Tim's Trek Farley made a weird sound and something snapped. He had tied his Thermarest had come untied and the loose string wound around his rear hub and snapped his pannier off. The Thermarest was nowhere to be seen and we were lucky that no spokes were broken. I rode back up to find the RidgeRest while Tim inspected his bike. His rear rack was severely bent and one of the pannier clips had been ripped off. Luckily, it's not the first time on an expedition that I've had something break and after about 15 minutes, we had a workable solution.

An hour later, we rendezvoused with the van for a quick resupply of food and water and started pedaled toward the dunes again. While stopped, the van had become a rest stop for several motorcyclists traveling from one small spot in Mongolia to another. One heart mother had her 12 year old daughter riding on back.

Eventually, we reached the sand dunes, a massive swath of sand spanning several miles in either direction. While only a mile or so wide, the massive dunes stretched all the way to the horizon (a noble feat in Mongolia).

After a little bit of scouting (and walking our bikes through the sand), we found a nice camp spot for the night. After camp was set up we, took a short hike up a nearby dune and were agog at the vista before us. The space is so big here that is almost impossible to describe.

We spotted two camels, a mother and calf, at the base of another dune and then leaped and jumped back to camp, cascading effortlessly on the sand.